Here Marx is concerned with the “general formula of capital”, independent of its particular forms as merchant’s capital, industrial capital or interest-bearing capital.

In its most general form capital is defined as value that expands itself, ‘self-valorising value’.

Chapter 5 – Contradictions in the General Formula

In this chapter Marx investigates the possibility that SV may arise within circulation.

He firstly argues that if commodities exchange at their value, which is the normal form of circulation, no SV can be created. To think otherwise is to confuse value with use-value (Marx finds this confusion to be the source of many errors of previous economists).

He then argues that SV cannot be created if all commodities are sold either above or below their values because gains cancelled by losses.

The conclusion is that SV can be created neither within nor outside circulation.

Chapter 6 – The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power

The solution to the contradiction is found in identifying a commodity which, when purchased, can be used to create more value than it has itself. Such a commodity is labour power.

Labour power is “the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind” (p. 270)

For labour-power to be a commodity certain preconditions are required:

The labourer must be a free individual, owner of his own labour-power, selling it for a limited period (e.g. not a slave or a serf).

Secondly, the labourer must be unable to produce commodities or subsist on the basis of his own labour.

The value of labour-power is “determined by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article…the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner” (p. 274)

An allowance for the production of a new generation and the education and training of the worker.

The value of labour-power depends, therefore, on the quantity of means of subsistence required and on the value of those means of subsistence.

Labour-power is quiet distinct from labour. Labour-power, the commodity sold by the worker, is only the capacity to labour. Thus when the buyer purchases labour-power he does not, unlike other commodities, have in his hands the use-value of the commodity, he still has to realise the labour-power by setting the worker to work in the sphere of production.

Thus the examination of labour-power takes us beyond circulation, to the “hidden abode of production” where SV is created as the labourer is set to labour.

Marx’s analysis shows that economic categories are in fact the economic forms of appearance of particular social relationships, forms of appearance that hide as much as they reveal.

Thus it is only analysis that shows us behind the commodity the labour of interdependent producers, behind money the social character of labour, and behind capital the relationship between capitalist and wage-labourer.

To remain at the level of these economic appearances is to ignore the social foundation of the economy and so to take the social relations on which it rests for granted, to treat them as though they were natural rather than a social and historical phenomena.